


Alternia Incognita: An Illegal History

by arcaladiwoompa



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia, Gen, SPAAAACE AAAAANTS!, Xenobiology, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 03:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 16,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2372270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcaladiwoompa/pseuds/arcaladiwoompa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s probably better not to know, but morbid curiosity makes you pull her aside as the others start heading back to their hives.  “Terezi, do I have a future?”</p><p>Her mouth quirks up into a crooked half grin.  “Well… kinda?”</p><p>“The flying fuck is that supposed to mean!?”</p><p>“You should go talk to Aradia,” Terezi suggests cryptically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cthchewy (pyrrhic_victoly)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victoly/gifts).



> This is based on Cthchewy's prompt, which asks for a story based on her headcanon that the troll species acts like slave making ants (look them up on Wikipedia if you're curious) with the mother grub/drone species as their hosts.

As soon as the searing green light fades away enough that you can start blinking splotches away from your eyes, you realize with a sinking feeling in your bile sack that the Scratch has not gone exactly as planned. You find yourself standing in your ablution block, squinting at your reflection in the mirror above the sink. Grey eyes stare back at you, heavily bruised with lack of sleep. The fact that they are not a ghostly white is only mildly reassuring. Are you alive, or have you simply failed to realize that your world has been reduced to a dreambubble now? Nothing is certain anymore. You begin to wander around your hive, looking for answers.

Your hive and your neighborhood both appear to be exactly the way you left them before you downloaded Sgrub; no meteors in sight; no Transportalizers, no imps, no Grist. There is no misplaced furniture; there are no holes in the walls. Your desktop has not exploded. The last small glimmer of hope that left in your bloodpusher is squelched when you realize the game has not seen fit to bring Crabdad back. You want nothing more than to lay in your recuperacoon and sleep for the rest of your miserable mutantblooded existence.

****

You are jarred into wakefulness by the sound of drones crashing through your hive’s front door. Well that was quick. Fuck this. Fuck everything. You take a deep breath and sink into the sopor slime until you are immersed to the tips of your horns. It’s a shitty hiding spot, but you don’t have the energy to care. They were going to cull you eventually. It may as well be now.

“Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuude!”

The drones sound an awful lot like Terezi. Lifting your head out of the slime like a monster from the deep, you glare warmed-over death at her. “I was ASLEEP, you colossal bilge drinker. Why did you break down my door and invade my respiteblock?” you grumble at her with flat disinterest.

“I was worried about you! You haven’t answered any of our messages in two nights! You haven’t even checked who made it after the Scratch, Mr. So-Called Team Leader!”

Shit, you’ve been out for that long? She isn’t even pretending to grin anymore. You stare off guiltily into some distant point beside her head while your mouth races ahead of your thinkpan and says, “Does it really matter? We’re back on Alternia, which means either I’m getting my mutant ass culled in the next sweep or two, or we’re going to have to start this bullshit game all over again, and this time we’ll be twice as fucked because I’m sure there they won’t give us any more dream clones in stupid pajamas.”

She scowls, clearly disgusted by the fact that you have given up so easily after coming so far. “Everyone’s alive, thanks for asking, even the humans. And we all kept our in game powers.”

“Great, so everyone can still fly except for me.” It was all you could think of to retort as she turned and left.

You hate Past You a little.

Actually, you hate Present You a lot.

Most of all, you have serious doubts about Future You.

You need an ablution and a hot meal.


	2. Chapter 2

It helps a little once you stop being an ass to all your friends and sneak out for a team meeting at Tavros’s hive. Once there, Terezi takes over as the impromptu team leader to explain everything about the future that she can still gather from her Seer powers. She expresses the importance of keeping in-game powers and flight a secret in front of other trolls, lest the imperial drones get wind of it. 

You are both relieved and vaguely disappointed when she lets everyone know that SGrub is never coming back. Each member of your team has been given a second chance at a more or less normal life on Alternia, more mature and prepared for battle than before. This is both more than you expected and less than you would have wanted. On an intellectual level you are vaguely happy for the hatefriends gathered around you, but you will never have a chance to meet your human counterparts though anything other than text and video feeds.

Future You still crowds out the majority of your emotions. Staring at Terezi, you wonder if she can See how long he exists.

It’s probably better not to know, but morbid curiosity makes you pull her aside as the others start heading back to their hives. “Terezi, do I have a future?”

Her mouth quirks up into a crooked half grin. “Well… kinda?”

“The flying fuck is that supposed to mean!?”

“You should go talk to Aradia,” Terezi suggests cryptically.

****

You go talk to Aradia, fully expecting her to be even less enlightening than Terezi about whatever the future has in store. Weeks later you realize you were at least somewhat right. She has started taking you with her to her favorite archaeological sites and has so far told you jack shit about it. When you think about this, you are surprised to find that you actually don’t mind. It’s nice to spend some time with a hatefriend you hadn’t really been well acquainted with before and during the game on account of her being a creepy ghost robot.

The more time you spend in her presence, the more interesting you find her old hobby. It’s hard not to pick up on her enthusiasm. But there’s one thing you still don’t get. Why did Aradia pick up archaeology again? Sure she’s good at it, but why dig up old bones and artifacts and cave paintings when she can fly back to the past with her God-Tier Time powers any fucking time she wants to and see them when they were brand new?

“But that’s the whole point!” She answers cheerfully when you ask. “It’s like solving a puzzle. You know what’s on the box, but you want to put it back together yourself. Or, it’s like one of Terezi’s whodunit mystery novels. You have a hunch as to what happened and then at the end of the book you can see if you were right! So it’s even more fun now that I can skip to the end of the book, so to speak. Just think, Alternia’s history is so long and colorful-” Ha. Ha. “-If I get bored of one mystery I can always go find another.” Her cavalier attitude gradually pulls you out of your funk.


	3. Chapter 3

“Karkat, I think you should see this!”

Aradia tugs you along by the grasping appendage, one warm hand tightly but not uncomfortably closed over your wrist. She comes to an abrupt halt and gives an urgent tug on your sleeve. “Look here! This is what I wanted to show you.” She points to a thin shelf of rock halfway up a sheer cliff face. Like fuck you’re about to climb up th- oh. Right. She can fly. Aradia hauls you bodily upward by your underarms, red butterfly wings beating a steady rhythm at your backs. It’s slightly uncomfortable and it freaks you out more than you care to admit. 

When you reach the shelf on the cliff face you try to plaster yourself very, very close to the wall. Aradia stops you, chastising you for trying to imprint your face all over a rock formation that has stood here for hundreds of millions of sweeps. Well excuse you for trying not to fall into the abyss like the non-winged, non-rocket-booted chump you are. You don’t want to end up like a certain someone you know, even if he did come back from the Scratched session not only alive but with both legs, his spinal column and his dignity restored.

Aradia gestures at something on the porous cliff face. “This is the oldest one I’ve found yet! I carbon dated it back to seven hundred million sweeps ago.”

You scowl at it. Apparently it’s some kind of prehistoric finger painting? Five completely two dimensional troll figures are standing next to each other, each facing toward the left. The leftmost figure is also largest and most detailed figure. She is a seadweller with a roundly curved body and lightly ridged horns that spiral backward from the top of her head. Her body is decorated with minute carvings in the shape of seashells around her neck. One hand grasps what appears to be a spear, longer than she is tall. The spear is carved with other minute details, but the color has faded and it’s hard to make out the exact shape. Clearly she was supposed to be portrayed in Tyrian ink, but some seven hundred million sweep old shitpan decided to go for the cheap ink and paint her red instead. If that isn’t asking to be culled, you don’t know what is.

A second seadweller stands next to her, also painted red. You can just make out the slightly curved spikes of his horns, one directly behind the other. They almost blend in with the spiky hair that follows behind until it smoothes out along the back of his head. In contrast the first figure, his is tall and almost comically slim. His face has been frozen into a lemon-faced scowl for seven hundred million sweeps, probably because he was clearly supposed to be painted violet.

The third figure is shaped like a hulking square with a STRONG underbite and massive horns that curve backward from his head like tusks. The fourth has Summoner wings, or something like them, with closely set leaf like horns. You wonder how the Condesce has not censored this fragment of rust blooded artistry out of existence yet.

Last, there appears to be a troll with psionics, crackling with carvings of lightning. Something that looks like three long feathers decorates the last troll’s backside, not unlike Nepeta’s robotic cat tail. At least it’s plausible for a troll with psionics to be a rust blood. You think if anyone depicted in these paintings was the one who actually painted them, it must have been the last troll.

Overall the painting looks like a cross between Nepeta’s shipping wall and Terezi’s justice roleplay chalk scribbles, if it were statistically possible for her to run out of all the other colors before red. “You took me here to see a seven hundred million sweep old fruity rumpus asshole party that ran out of colors?” Secretly you are impressed. Okay maybe not so secretly.

Aradia’s grin widens, and she winks at you. “Let me show you some totally illegal time lapse photography.” Sitting down on the cliff shelf, legs dangling casually over the edge, she decaptchalogues her husktop and wakes it up from sleep mode. You gingerly lower yourself next to her, pointedly sitting a little farther from the edge with your legs crossed in front of you.

Aradia starts up a slide show of archaeological photographs showing similar artwork on various other cliff faces, sorted in reverse chronological order. As she flips through them slowly enough for you to focus on each one with a furrowed brow, it becomes readily apparent that the colors are _all_ running out, slowly fading out into red as the clock turns back.

“Wait.” Your brain is trying to catch up with your eyes and failing. “Are you implying that seven hundred million sweeps ago trolls were all rust bloods?” It even makes sense, a little. They are still the most common blood color. If this is true, it has to be the most illicit knowledge that ever passed through your think sponge.

“Nope!”

The alternative is even more unthinkable. It only _looks_ maroon because blood darkens when it dries, your brain supplies helpfully. Remember when your stab wound scabbed over?

“…Oh fuck. Oh FUCK.” You cling to Aradia like a box of manic fish hooks. “Take me with you, I have to see it for myself, I can’t-“

“Calm down Karkat! You’re still on top of a cliff, remember?”

You shakily let go of her, lean back and try to focus on slowing down your breathing. “Sorry.”

“I can take you with me, but you will have to be patient,” Aradia continues, “It’s too dangerous to go so far back in time without any preparation. You’ll see why after some schoolfeeding.”


	4. Chapter 4

For your first set of lessons, Aradia teaches you as much as she is able about the lives of the ancient trolls. There is precious little data to extrapolate from, and all of it is glaringly different from your own experiences. In contrast to Her Imperious Condescension’s iron rule which unites entire conquered galaxies, the ancient trolls lived in decentralized colonies with defined territories, each led by a single Queen. 

Neighboring colonies may merge, wage war on each other, or migrate to completely new territories in search of resources. The role of Mother Grubs and drones is unclear, as smaller colonies are often depicted without them, and entire hives of Mother Grubs and Drones are depicted with nary a troll in sight. Aradia has not found a single allusion to a lusus in this period.

Bizarrely, even with no blood colors there is still a hemocaste of sorts. The ancient trolls are divided into three groups: seadwellers, soldiers and workers. Seadwellers are the smallest in number, which apparently has not changed to the present day. Among the seadwellers, the large ones become Queens and will either fight for dominance in the colony they hatched in or will migrate away to form their own. Smaller seadwellers become personal guards to the Queen.

Soldiers are more numerous, and grow to a grotesque size from an early age. Some seem destined from their hatching day to grow even bigger than the other.

The worker class is the largest in number. Many workers have formidable special skills and will also join the soldiers in a fight. During her research, Aradia has come across depictions of trolls with wings, psionics, the ability to commune with animals, or the ability to control other trolls. Most of the workers have no special talents and do whatever jobs the colony needs them to do.

Your clothes look nothing like the paintings in Aradia’s collection of ancient photographs, and this, she tells you, is a big problem.

“Neither do yours,” you point out, gesturing at her God Tier outfit.

Her wings disappear. Her clothing shifts to glamorous, well fitted silk with an insect husk trim, fast as thought. Aradia is a cheating cheater who cheats.

There is no better way to get culled than to stand out like a sore thumb. You have abided by this lesson for your whole life, which is why your next schoolfeeding stop takes you to Kanaya’s hive. Beetle husks in various sizes, courtesy of Nepeta, are a rather exotic material for her to work with, but you make it work somehow, stringing them along and tying them together with silk thread like scales.

Several measurements, patterns, needle threadings, pinpricks and subsequent cursing later, you end up with a weird looking scale male shirt and silk pants. You feel simultaneously underdressed and overdressed. Even though you think you look ridiculous in your new outfit, you stencil your sign onto the front of your scale mail in red pigment.

After Kanaya is finished with her lessons, you are still not confident that you will ever be able to make clothing that looks normal. At least you’ve learned how to make it fit.

****

As hesitant as you are to leave them behind, your sickles do not fit in with seven hundred million sweep old technology either. Going unarmed would be damned near suicidal, so you have to learn to make your own shitty Stone Age weapons out of shitty Stone Age materials.

They haven’t even discovered METALS. When you complain to Aradia about this, she points out everything you would need before you could make a proper steel sickle. You would need knowledge of metals and alloys. You would need to mine iron and manganese. You would need a furnace, tongs, a hammer, ceramic molds, and an anvil.

Okay fine. With a dismayed frown you run through the materials at your disposal: wood, stone, silk, plant fibers, cartilage, carapace. Carving a giant clam shell into a sickle would probably suit your purposes the best, but Aradia cautions that you might draw suspicion that way without bringing a seadweller along. Obviously you can’t bring Eridan or Feferi with you; for once not even Aradia will have an easy time fitting in.

With some help from Equius to hew out the rough shapes, you eventually carve out a pair of sickles from the tough carapace of a juvenile stampede beetle and wrap up the handles with strips of leather. Your new weapons are sharp and glossy, gleaming black. They are not as bad as you thought they would be. While you’re at it, you fashion a knife and a hatchet from the leftover carapace and carefully pack them away.

Now all you have to do is to prove you can catch a stampede beetle for yourself. You are eager to test the balance of your shiny new sickles.

****

Wow, Aradia was right. You were so fucked, you didn’t even realize how fucked you were. Having learned to safely and cleanly take down beasts several times your size in the game, you thought that this was going to be easy.

It isn’t. As it turns out, you have to _find_ your prey first. Nepeta gives you a crash course on tracking, and you find yourself straining your eyes and ears for sound and movement far more than you ever had before. Then once you find a stampede beetle to catch, sneaking up on it isn’t easy either. The juveniles, about the size of an average barkbeast, will not charge at you like an ogre. They will run the fuck away and burrow into a flat hole that is just too narrow for you to fit inside. God damn it.

As for the adults, Nepeta informs you that they are bigger than your hive and will charge so hard they can uproot a tree. You will do your best to stay clear of them.

Did you mention that there will be no thermal hulls either? Intellectually you knew this already, _of course_ , what kind of dunderfuck would you be otherwise? But damn are they ever a useful crutch in your life. Several hunting runs later, when you finally manage to trap the beetle without Nepeta’s help, she teaches you how to make the most of the carcass. Thoroughly cleaned, the husk will not spoil and can be carved into tools. She shows you where to check for eggs and how, if this were a certain type of caterpillar or spider, to make strong silk threads to use for ropes and clothing.

You were never a very good cook before, but now it will be essential for your survival. Making a fire out of sticks and flint is a pain in the ass and makes you wish you had psionics. It would be so much easier to give up and eat everything raw like your sharp teeth are designed to do, but uncooked meat will spoil quickly. Gathering salt, spices, vegetables and mushrooms ( _those_ , not those, fur goodness sakes!) is boring and tedious, but you would start to hate your food very quickly if you never took the time to do so.

Nepeta tries her best to cram the lessons of her lifetime into little over a week, and you are grateful for her efforts.


	5. Chapter 5

Between you and Aradia you now have rudimentary knowledge, rudimentary tools, rudimentary clothing, and a rudimentary supply of dried food. This is probably as prepared as you can get under the circumstances. You are about to go somewhere you will never get culled for your blood color and the Condesce will never find you. Unfortunately, it means you have to leave all of your hatefriends behind.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Aradia asks as if you have already decided that you will live out the rest of your future seven hundred million sweeps in the past. She might be right, at that.

You nod, but you can’t quite meet her eyes. Once you go you will have a few more days to change your mind before Aradia travels back to the present. By the time you finish giving a round of goodbye hugs to everyone, you have to tug urgently on Aradia’s sleeve to hurry up and get on with it already because if you linger any longer they’re all going to see you shedding fat red-tinted tears like a freshly hatched wiggler.

She grabs hold of one hand while you scrub furiously at your eyes with the other, trying to pretend it’s nothing more than a grain of dirt. The world rolls away with the sound of ticking clockwork. You remove your hand from your watery eyes and _gape_. Well-greased gears fill your entire field of vision all the way to the edge of infinity. You chance a look downward and wish you hadn’t. You are standing on thin air above an endless expanse of spinning gears. The sight makes your stomach feel like it has dropped out from under you.

After a long, dizzying moment, the gears also roll away and you are left blinking at a moonscape that is completely alien to you. You are standing on top of a hill that slopes down toward a rocky beach. The farther your eyes travel away from the shoreline, the more hills they come across, eventually resting on a rigid spine of mountains. Everything is teeming with lush vegetation in the form of ferns, palm trees, lichen, fungi, and pine trees. At least two of the mountain peaks look suspiciously clear of plant life.

Everything around you is still and silent, bathed in a glare of pink and green. A warm breeze stirs the humid air, carrying the scent of brine to your nostrils. “Where the fuck are we?”

Beside you, Aradia has shifted into her prehistoric style garb. She lets go of your hand. “We’re right outside your lawnring, circa seven hundred million sweeps ago.”

“But I don’t live next to the fucking ocean! Where the fuck did all these hills come from? Where the fuck did that ass-stabbingly jagged MOUNTAIN RANGE come from?”

“Seven hundred million sweeps, Karkat! Alternia’s tectonic plates have moved a long way since then! And those are volcanoes, by the way.”

You eye the mountain range warily. “Active volcanoes?”

“Yup! At least those two. See how they go cone shaped at the top and there aren’t any trees on the slopes?” Grey eyes glinting, Aradia warms to her topic. “There were many more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in this time than there are now in ours. We are standing near a divergent plate boundary, meaning the tectonic plates are moving away from each other and forming a new area of ocean floor. In our time, these volcanoes have gone extinct and eroded away into small hills, and part of the ocean floor forming here will be pushed up and turned into a flat plain with mountains on the other end, where two tectonic plates are coming together and one slides underneath the other. That’s why the area around your hivestem is mostly flat.”

Alternia is determined to kill you one way or another. At least dying in a raging river of lava would be a pretty badass way to go, you suppose. You will try to stick to high ground and avoid the obviously barren areas if you ever suspect that the volcanoes are about to erupt. “Well strap me to a flogging jut and call me educated. Let’s get the fuck out of here and find that cave painting you showed me before.”


	6. Chapter 6

It will not be easy slogging through chest deep vegetation and ankle deep mud with no roads and no map. Aradia leads you along the rough black rocks of the shoreline. You wonder if she knows where she’s going, but you don’t ask. If the mountains and the ocean are anything to judge by, for all you know the ancient art could have moved to the other side of the planet in the interim. Your travel companion seems to perk up when she comes across a stream emptying its contents into the ocean. One sharp right turn later you are following every curve of the stream toward its source. You reluctantly leave the bare rock into a crush of vegetation. Now you’re more or less going the same direction the paintings would have been if you were in the present day.

“Karkat, do you remember the canyon we walked through to get to those paintings? This stream is going to carve out the whole thing in about five hundred million sweeps, but after that the riverbed will be bone dry.”

You reply with a mildly interested grunt, too busy minding your steps to fully engage in conversation. There are tree roots, spiny weeds, and slippery, muddy rocks to avoid. As you press on into the hills, the stream is already forming its own little canyon that drops off to your left. Your footsteps are following a narrow antler beast trail through the bushes, and you are mildly grateful for whichever prehistoric creature made it.

****

After several hours you find yourself at a place where the stream runs beside you at the same elevation again, wide and shallow and full of smooth jutting rocks. The antler beast trail widens as well. There is a large gap between the trees and a flat muddy patch of riverbank where it is easy to access the water without falling in. It must be a popular place for animals to stop for a drink, because the mud looks well trampled, full of prints of all kinds. Both you and Aradia are getting hungry and tired, so you decide that this is a good place to stop for a little while. You take a drink from the water flask you brought with you and refill it from the stream.

“Look at all these little footprints, the ones that look like it was made by something with a thousand legs. They must be fresh or else they wouldn’t be so distinct. Whatever left those tracks can’t be any bigger than a medium sized barkbeast. Do you think we could follow the footprints, catch it and eat it?”

“Sure, we could give it at try.”

“With no psionics. That’s fucking cheating.”

Aradia flashes an amused grin at you, and lets you lead the way. You make note of the direction of the river and the animal tracks with respect to the magnetic lines you can feel with your horns to keep from getting lost, then you start to follow the tracks toward your quarry. Your face nearly cramps with concentration as you look for signs of a disturbance everywhere the tracks seem to lead to a dead end. 

You really, really do not want to screw this up. Secretly you are seriously anxious about the skills Nepeta taught you, whether they stuck or not, and how much of it will be useful here. Come springtime, you are not certain that any of the herbs and mushrooms she taught you to forage for will even exist. But right now the soft mud is a godsend. This is probably the easiest trail you are ever going to get, one that you can pick up again after a short distance even if you lose it among a group of rocks or underneath some ferns.

Aradia notices it before you do. For a split second you wonder why she has stopped in her tracks so abruptly, then you see the flicker of shadows among the trees and you freeze in place too. The wind is in your favor. You remember Nepeta telling you to never let your prey smell you until you are within pouncing distance.

The creature, a fat and stubby millipede, is just about the size you expected it to be. You sneak up on it very carefully, hiding the sound of your footsteps behind the breeze. With each step closer you duck behind a tree for cover. If you get close enough with a good line of sight, you can just about aim, wait for the wind to die down _just so_ , and…   
“Ha!” The sickle you have hurled at it gruesomely severs the millipede’s head halfway from its body, leaking blood everywhere. Now all you have to do is wait for it to get too weak to keep running away, and you can cull the poor bastard out of its misery. Behind you Aradia cheers with delight. You peel the beast out of its husk and hoist the meat up on a spit. You are the smuggest, proudest asshole on Alternia as you build up a small fire to roast it whole.

You are also a green horned sopor-for-brains who has done jack shit to cover up his tracks all the way from the river to the copious blood trail left by the millipede and is making noise and smoke in the forest like a mile wide red flag painted with the words CULL ME in sparkling rainbows. Did you mention you’ve been celebrating so hard you haven’t even been paying much attention to your surroundings since you made your catch?

The prehistoric troll camp- five wickedly grinning sets of long, sharp, _adult_ teeth - has you completely surrounded. “Mind if we share?”


	7. Chapter 7

A warning spark flashes across Aradia’s horns, but the loud crack of psionics that misses her head by mere inches and leaves a smoldering hole in the trunk of a pine tree silences her quite effectively. You should be scared shitless, but instead you are completely slack-jawed with awe at the trolls around you. You have never seen an adult troll anywhere else than in the movies and they look _so much bigger_ in person.

This group appears to match the ancient painting Aradia found. Whoever made the simple sketches has done a good job of making each troll recognizable. The troll who nearly fried Aradia has long, pointy beaklike horns jutting upward from either side of her head, as if she had started to grow double horns but they fused together. She has a slim athletic build and is about one head taller than you and Aradia. Her large aquiline nose is pierced through the septum with a talon from some unidentifiable insect. She wears boots with massive claws stitched onto the toes. Her clothing is entirely decorated with metallic beetle husks in various colors, each about the size of your hand. A tail made from large dragonfly wings sweeps out dramatically behind her from the back of her cloak. You are reminded of Eridan’s stupid cape, which makes you immediately file away Sparky here as a pompous nookwhiff.

The same goes for the twiggy seadweller with the constipated sneer standing clockwise from Sparky. He is actually _shorter_ than the psionic troll, which either means the drawing of him corresponds to the size of his ego rather than his actual height or that being a seadweller grants him the right to take up more canvas space. He has large, luminous eyes that you suspect might glow in the dark. You were expecting his clothing to be ornate and impractical, but instead the simple unadorned silk hugs his frame closely. His head, hands and feet are bare. He is not wearing a single piece of jewelry. You get the impression that he _actually_ swims in the water instead of fucking around trying to look posh. He is pointing some kind of harpoon crossbow contraption directly at you. The frame is made from dark polished wood, and the bolt is made from sharpened chitin.

Next to him, a gigantic three troll wide slab of muscle is blocking so much of your escape route back to the river that you wonder how he even managed to fit in this clearing without bulldozing fifty trees along the way. He is wearing shiny black tuskbeast beetle husk armor that reaches from his shoulders to mid-knee. His weapon is some kind of glaive, its shape similar to a sickle on the end of a long pole. It is carved from a single horn from some kind of beetle that must have been larger than an entire hive. The hulking Soldier’s bare arms are covered in abstract swirling black tattoos. He has a square face and keeps his hair in long dreadlocks that almost reach the backs of his knees.

A fourth troll blocks off nearly a full one hundred and eighty degrees of your space with her impressive candy red wingspan. Her wings curve in the shape of a Luna moth, with black eye spots and white trim around the edges. She is short in stature relative to her hivemates, yet she still has a good couple of inches on you. Her hair looks soft, fuzzy, and full of static as if she had placed her hand on a psionic globe. She has large eyes and a flat, wide nose. She wears a cloak trimmed with caterpillar fuzz around the bottom, the sleeves and the hood. Her weapon is a simple wooden throwing spear, and several more are strapped to her back.

Completing the circle, the Queen towers over you at more than twice your height. Despite the way she was depicted in the paintings, she is not quite as tall as the Soldier, let alone taller than him. Then again, as the reigning Condesce of her territory, you figure she is allowed to exaggerate.

The Queen looks well fed and voluptuous, with narrow shoulders, wide hips, and a round stomach, all draped in a silk dress painstakingly decorated with thousands of tiny seashells. From up close you can see that the various colors of seashells form a mosaic pattern of a nautilus between two layers of waves. It turns out that the detail that didn’t survive from the drawing of her weapon to the modern age is that the tip of her spear is made from sharpened obsidian, sharpened into spikes on the end like four rows of teeth.

She has a round face with the _cutest_ button nose that it would probably be suicidal to comment on aloud. Her hair is coiled up into complicated braids at the back of her head; they must have taken hours to do. Scalloped fins frame either side of her face, gill slits run along either side of her neck, and her eyes are unabashedly, gloriously filled in with mutant candy red. She looks SO COOL it makes you want to cry.

“Can I – can we join your colony?” You gasp out reverently.

The Queen quirks an eyebrow at you. You stiffen as she moves her gaze between you and Aradia, contemplating. For a second her expression softens, almost lusus-like, then she breaks out into a wide grin. “Shore! We could use a couple of wigglers like you.”

The Winged troll’s shit-eating sneer crumbles. She was about to take your breathless silence as an excuse to gloat.


	8. Chapter 8

There is enough millipede meat to share with the entire group. After you have all settled around the fire in a circle, the Queen begins to speak. “I am Queen Nautilus Curl. You sea here my whole colony: Royal Guard Conodont Fin, Raider Thunder Beak, Scout Wings of Moth, and Soldier Granite Jaw.” It’s pretty easy to figure out who is who from the names, but you will have to pull Aradia aside and ask her what the fuck a conodont is later.

“We are descendants of the domain of Queen Ammonite Stripe hunting our own Grub Nest this season. This side of the mountain belongs to me.” A bold claim from the leader of such a small group. You wonder how much competition she has and whether you would have been better or worse off with Queen Ammonite Stripe instead. “I will allow you to join us on our hunt. Mind you, I am only doing this because I do not consider you to be a threat. Your countenances are eager, but first I must judge if you speak the truth. Tell me, where are you from? Does your Queen mean to insult me by sending wigglers to infiltrate my territory?” Her tone is casual, but the mistrustful glint in her eye is anything but.

You are busy freaking out, so you let Aradia do the talking for you. It must be easy for a God Tier like her to keep her cool. She might still be invincible, but even if she isn’t she can still time warp the fuck out of this place. Your eyes are locked on her, urging her to ditch you at the first sign that serious harm could befall her. You are not important. It is immaterial whether you are culled in the present or the past.

“My name is Aradia Megido, and this is Karkat Vantas.”

“The shell kind of names are those? I gotta come up with somefin more suitable soon,” Nautilus Curl interrupts. Your ears were expecting the word ‘betta’ among the nautical puns and you are confused by its absence. “Anemoneway, do go on.”

“We came a long way from the territory of Her Imperious Condescension. She is unaware that we are here.”

“Oh I _see_ ,” Nautilus Curl nods slowly with a relaxed grin. “Struck out for quadrants unknown, then? Ah, the nights of youth and rebellion. Stick around; we might collect a few more like you before the sweep is out.”

 _Saved._ Apparently this sort of thing happens relatively often, then. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. Then a sobering thought occurs to you: if you ever find a new moirail here, you will never be able to confide the whole truth in him or her. You ache for the relationship with Gamzee that should have been perfect but fell apart into a one sided shambles instead. You feel hollow and lonely, and Aradia hasn’t even left yet.

****

By the time you are finished with dinner, both moons are hanging low in the sky and the horizon is a characteristic pre-dawn grey. Clean up is easy. All you have to do is wash off the remaining carapace with a little water and Granite Jaw packs it away in his long, tubular husk mail bag for later use. You furrow your brows at the gradually lightening sky. Has time really flown by that fast or is dawn approaching hours sooner than you expected?

“Aradia. Hey.” You nudge her side with your elbow as the rest of the group prepares to set up camp. “What time is it?” The fact that she doesn’t have a watch is irrelevant.

“It’s… huh.” Her perplexed frown nearly makes your blood pusher stop. Did she lose her Time powers? Is she now stuck here with you forever??? You are the worst friend to ever crawl out of the cocoon slime. You should have accepted your fate as a mutant instead of selfishly making her drag you to Ass-Backwards-Ville. In your moment of panic you almost miss what she says next.

Aradia lowers her voice so that it carries no farther than your ears. “Only five past two, and three seconds. Sorry Karkat, I had to do some conversions. I’m afraid we’ll have to suffer through some jet lag for a little while. Alternia used to spin faster and we only have nineteen hour nights at this time. You will need to get used to shorter, more frequent periods of rest.”

“Thank FUCK. It’s not like my sleep cycle hasn’t been torn to shreds by horrorterrors already. I almost thought you- it was something worse.”

“Try not to ask about that again unless it’s really important, alright?”

“Oh shit, sorry. Yeah. One more thing- what the fuck is a conodont?”

“It’s like an eel.” Aradia answers.

You side-eye Conodont Fin’s skinny seadweller ass. Yeah, sounds about right.

Thunder Beak is drilling a temporary hive in the mud with her psionics; Granite Jaw shores up the opening with large, flat slabs of rock. Wings of Moth is gathering great armfuls of fern leaves, and you are surprised to see that both seadwellers have joined her and are doing the same. You scramble to help them until they decide they have gathered enough. All of the leaves are heaped at the entrance to the burrow. Aradia joins Thunder Beak with her own psionics, shaping the scooped up mud into shallow fortifications around the campfire.

When they finish minutes later, you step inside to line the bottom of the burrow with the fern leaves you gathered. Fern leaves will be a hell of a lot more comfortable to sleep on than mud, but it’s going to be pretty shitty sleeping without sopor again. The temporary hive has a long entrance hallway, a separate sleeping chamber for the Queen, and one large sleeping chamber for everyone else to share. Wow, your hatefriends couldn’t even share a massive lab on a meteor without killing each other. These trolls must _actually_ get along.

You curl up next to Aradia and hope she doesn’t misconstrue it as a pale advance. Wings of Moth, Granite Jaw and Thunder Beak hem you in on all sides while Conodont Fin goes on watch at the entrance of the hallway. Oddly, you feel calmer than you have in ages as you drift off to sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

You wake up early in the evening. You step outside, yawning and stretching, and are immediately assaulted by steadily falling raindrops. Thick clouds have completely blanketed the sky, blocking out the remnants of the sunset. Last night’s campfire has completely gone out.

Queen Nautilus Curl is returning from the nearby stream with a net full of shellfish, which Aradia and Granite Jaw are already eating raw for breakfast. Wings of Moth is nowhere in sight, but the other trolls do not seem to be in a hurry to find out where she went. Conodont Fin is getting a little extra sleep in after his watch shift while Thunder Beak uses her psionics to funnel falling rain into everyone’s water flasks. As soon as she catches sight of you she funnels a water slide worth of rainfall right into your face. “Oh sorry, did I hit you? How could I not see you standing there?”

“You’re the one who needs a shower, you putrid bulgemongler,” you growl at her in response. Admittedly, the water was not unpleasantly cold and it did wake you up. You rub the last of the sleep out of your eyes and –oh- _that’s_ where Wings of Moth went. She has left pheromones so thick in the air that even your insensitive nose paints an image in your field of vision; a faint, translucent streak of yellow trailing eastward across the sky.

After a quick breakfast, you all start following the scent trail. You haven’t bothered to clean up the camp site at all; it might make a handy bolt hole in the territory later. Then again, if this weather keeps up, it might just as well turn into a small lake. Conodont Fin takes up the rear of the group, breakfast in hand. His fins flare out in the rain and his red eyes, though tired, shine with alertness.

Thunder Beak apparently wants attention, and the other adults are too used to her to pay any mind to her when she tries to make herself a pest by weaving in and out, in front of and too close to everyone as they walk. You, the great leader, take the bait on behalf of the team. “What the fuck do you want, Thunder Beak? Is your attention span too short to pick just one troll at a time to black flirt with, or are you just bored?”

She sidles up to you, grinning brightly, but does not get into your personal space. “Black flirting? Don’t you know **anything**? Why would anyone black flirt with someone from the same colony? Isn’t that against the rules, where you’re from? Would you not want to keep order in your own colony by allowing all the other quadrants only? Would you not want to wreak havoc on other hives with your rivalry and accept only the best genetic material when the time is right?”

“What’s with all the fucking questions?”

“Are you mocking my quirk?”

“Oh my fucking god, is your quirk the question game?”

“Would you like to play the question game with me, knowing that I will always win?”

“Hell fucking no. Piss off and go bother someone else.”

“Aww, why aren’t you any fun?”

“How are **you** even more annoying than my other hatefriends?”

“If you have a lot of other hatefriends, why did you leave them behind to join us?”

You fold your arms over your chest and stubbornly stick out your jaw. “Next fucking question.”

“Very well, will you perhaps answer later?” She is not deterred by your silence, changing the subject instead. “Did you think we were going to kill you yesterday, especially me?”

“That’s a stupid question. Of course you would have. We’re in your territory and you’re obviously stronger. We wouldn’t have gone down without a big fight, but it seemed inevitable.”

Thunder Beak’s eyes grow huge. “Will you believe that I was looking for a fight, or at least a prisoner, for something more exciting to do? Will you forgive me?”

“Okay, fuck it, fine, yeah. Somehow I’m miraculously not dead yet.” You have forgiven greater transgressions before. At some point you may have even forgiven the Empress if she had let you live out your dream of becoming a Threshecutioner. “I thought you were already headed for a fight though. Queen Nautilus Curl told us you’re on a hunt for a Grub Nest.” Whatever the fuck that means.

She nods enthusiastically. “Are you excited?”

“Probably not as excited as you are.”

“Howcome?”

Although you refuse to admit it, it’s because you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.


	10. Chapter 10

Up to this point Queen Nautilus Curl has not been nearly as imperial as you would have expected from her. You are constantly surprised by her willingness to pitch in and help the others- building a temporary hive, fishing and sharing food, carrying supplies and walking on her own feet all the way here instead of having Thunder Beak float her around with psionics or Granite Jaw carry her. She is chatty and casual, acting more like a mother hen than a fearsome tyrant to her small colony.

Shortly after midnight, however, Queen Nautilus Curl bids her subjects to fall silent and gestures them to halt with a hand gesture. She takes the lead and stands tall and alert at the head of the colony.

Wings of Moth’s scent trail is the reason for the abrupt stop. The pale yellow ribbon ends in a thick line of orange, a cautionary perimeter it would be unwise to cross. Nautilus Curl steps slowly to the right and signals the group to follow. As you reach a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley, Wings of Moth emerges from her hiding place in the tall palm trees to join you.

Wings of Moth reaches out her hands to part the foliage that springs up from the cracks in between the rocks; there is just enough space for one troll to peek through. While you wait for your turn to have a look, Thunder Beak floats up into the treetop vantage point Wings of Moth recently vacated, grinning fiercely. When Aradia floats up after her, you hear a faint gasp. Okay what the fuck is going on?

Finally, squinting through the parted fern leaves you HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE IMPERIAL DRONES WHY IS NOBODY PANICKING. …Nobody is panicking. You unflip your shit and try to focus on what the drones are actually doing. Instead of carrying buckets of slurry or culling some unfortunate asswipe, they appear to be swarming around a spiked caterpillar the size of a bus, gradually picking it apart with their razor sharp mandibles. It looks like a horrible way to die.

The caterpillar flails and writhes about, slamming into drone after drone with enough force that you can feel the vibrations in your feet from all the way up the hill. Yet no matter how many drones are impaled with the caterpillar’s poisoned spikes, twitching and curling in their death throes, hundreds more are crowding in to take their place. Thank fuck the drones haven’t noticed you.

Soon the caterpillar succumbs to its gruesome fate and stops struggling. The drones surge up underneath and start carrying what’s left of it away in one gargantuan chunk along the long scar the unfortunate caterpillar had chewed through the palm forest. Their path is littered with carnage; mangled bits of dead and dying drones are lying everywhere.

“Is anyone else bored of walkin all this way?” Queen Nautilus Curl asks cheerfully. “’Cause I shore am!” With that, she stows away her spear and gently nudges you aside, touching her hands to both temples. Her face freezes into intense concentration as she communes with the seven nearest uninjured drones, one for each of you. They march over to the group of trolls in an orderly line. Then you nearly shit yourself as they surround you with skittering feet and clacking claws.

Queen Nautilus Curl climbs onto a drone’s back, her arms clasped around its neck. “Flop on, kids! We’re gettin a ride!” Feeling completely mute and numb, you pick a mount at random, climb on, and cling for dear life as it starts to carry you away through the forest. The drones under Nautilus Curl’s control stay hidden and follow the line of imperial drones from a safe distance as they march back toward their nest.

Hours later, a mountainous brown brooding cavern looms before you, jutting out of the forest like half a set of rotting teeth. Drones of all shapes and sizes are crawling in it, around it, and all over it. Carpenter droids add piles of saliva covered sand to harden at the top of the pile, building the spires and tunnels ever higher as you watch. Imperial drones are carrying carved meat into every entrance. You even see not one but several gigantic drones that resemble everything you have ever been schoolfed about His Honorable Tyranny.

It feels bizarre watching one of the imperial drones stop to feed a piece of caterpillar directly into one’s overgrown mouth. You never could have imagined that an entire hive could consist entirely of wild drones working together as a cohesive unit without a single troll giving commands. It makes so much sense to see them all together instead of separated by function that you wonder how the thought never even crossed your mind before. Few trolls in your time ever learned about the life cycle of drones and how they were hatched, classified information strictly reserved for the upper echelons of the Empire.

Dawn is about to break. While you stay hidden in the brush, the drones under Queen Nautilus Curl’s control dutifully bring you a portion of their cache of meat. When they are finished, Nautilus Curl commands Granite Jaw to cull all seven, standing still as statues all in a row; the witnesses to your treachery have been destroyed. Nautilus Curl slumps in exhaustion against the trunk of a tall coconut tree as Thunder Beak and Aradia make quick work of digging another shelter for the night. You scramble to gather firewood and line the earth with soft fern leaves. Your small colony lets Queen Nautilus rest without being asked. Now you understand how she commands so much respect without having to look threatening at all times.


	11. Chapter 11

You toss and turn in the fern leaves for about half an hour then give up entirely, too wound up to sleep. Instead you join Conodont Fin and his thoughtful scowl as he keeps watch over the entrance. What is his deal? You haven’t seen him smile once the entire time you’ve been here. His finned ears perk up with interest when you sit down next to him.

There is just enough space for both of you in the narrow corridor. A few narrow shafts of harsh Alternian sunlight are filtering in through the cracks where the round hive entrance is sealed off with a heavy, irregularly shaped boulder, courtesy of Soldier Granite Jaw. The effect is cozy; it feels similar to your respiteblock with the blinds drawn over the windows. This place looks safe for now, but if the nearby hive of drones were to catch wind of you they could dig through the walls in no time flat and slaughter all of you. You are glad that Conodont Fin is on watch.

A long moment of shared silence passes before you before the seadweller opens his mouth to speak. His voice is rich, smooth, deep and pleasant enough that you wonder why he seems to keep quiet most of the time.

“Get some sleep, green horned wiggler.  
You’ll need it soon tonight.  
Will this be your first grub raid?  
You may still need to fight,

Though it is more likely  
That Queen Nautilus Curl  
Will employ you to keep watch  
And take along the girl.

You and I can’t carry  
As much as a Raider can.  
Our role is better suited  
To caring for the clan.”

Well shit, maybe it’s because he feels compelled to speak in **fucking poetry**. That must take far too much effort. You can’t decide whether you’re impressed or you think he’s an overdramatic douche. Probably both. Either way he sounded like he was about to grubsit you all night tomorrow, and that pisses you off. “I’ll have you know I’m a seasoned veteran, fuck you very much,” you grump back at him.

“If we can help it,  
We do not let our young trolls  
Get culled stupidly.

Perhaps you can krill  
Two or three drones by yourself,  
But not a whole nest.

Our numbers are few.  
Of drones, there may be thousands.  
We need strategy.

What keeps you awake?  
Is it that you are nervous?  
Do not worry.

We will outsmart them.  
If you focus with your horns  
You can map their caves.”

Really? You often use the magnetic senses of your horns to help you judge the distance of nearby solid objects, but you have never actually needed to see through walls before. Conodont Fin falls silent again while you close your eyes and give it a try.

You do not have psionics, but you can strengthen the stream of magnetic pulses you emit from your horns and read back the echo as if seeing with your eyes. Instantly the dimensions of your new colony’s temporary hive come back to you along with the shape and location of all the trolls sleeping in it. Conodont Fin and the walls of the temporary hive are thrown into sharp relief. Everything appears to be forged from a thin layer of shining silver with deep black shadows. You can feel the difference in density between the packed earth walls, the bodies of your travel companions, and the smooth boulder sealing off the hive entrance.

Where your eyes see only forward, your horns give you an indistinct panoramic picture that wraps all 360 degrees around your head. Whichever direction you choose to focus your attention on comes out more clearly; textures jump out at you in vivid black and white detail, so easily overlooked with color vision. It’s easy to get distracted. Is this how Sollux felt when he went blind? No, he must have lost his hornsense too, the poor bastard. He couldn’t use his psionics anymore until the game saw fit to make him whole again. 

You concentrate really hard on trying to see through the walls. It take a lot of experimenting with the wavelength you emit from your horns before you can tune out the walls that are closest to you and make out a few faint outlines in the middle distance where the packed earth opens up into a drone hive tunnel. A brief flicker in the outlines informs you of something large and hard moving through the tunnel. Its shape is indistinct, muffled by both distance and the layer of earth between you, but since there are no other possibilities you can guess that it must be some kind of drone.

God damn it, this is hard. You hope this will be easier after you hit your next growth spurt. The effort wears you out and you decide to try to sleep again. But first, you still have a question. Was Crabdad right? “Did your face get stuck like that?”

“I always think ten steps ahead, planning, plotting, pondering.  
Leave me alone, you nosy brat, and get back to globefondling.”

You snort with amusement as you return to the main chamber of the underground camp and lay down on your side. It’s almost tempting to start spewing colorful insults in rhyme yourself.


	12. Chapter 12

Conodont Fin was right. At dusk, Queen Nautilus Curl instructs everyone to eat a big breakfast out of the colony’s store of supplies. Instead of leaving the temporary hive, you, Wings of Moth and Conodont Fin mill about awkwardly under the pretence of guarding the entrance while Nautilus Curl, Aradia and Thunder Beak each use their psionics to expand the temporary hive into a long tunnel. Granite Jaw uses his immense strength to expel the loose dirt out of the tunnel entrance, which means you are now in the way.

Between the four trolls inside the tunnel work is going quickly, but waiting for them to get wherever they are trying to go is boring. While they dig, Conodont Fin ends up taking a nap under a palm tree while Wings of Moth keeps an eye out for danger from atop its branches. You are also tired from staying up late, but you don’t feel like going back to sleep so you awkwardly try to climb up Wings of Moth’s palm tree to join her instead. Once you are within reach she grabs hold of your wrist and helps you up the rest of the way, where the thick, ridged trunk curves forward enough for both of you to sit straddling it.

“What exactly are we doing?” You ask her.

Wings of Moth rolls her round eyes as if this wasn’t a perfectly reasonable question. “You look six or seven sweeps old; I’m surprised you’ve never been on a raid before. Why is that? Did you spend all your time at the hive taking care of grubs? Or maybe raising baby drones? Or guarding the nest? No, you don’t look strong enough for that. Maybe you were your Queen Condescension’s favorite coddled little wiggler with your cute little nub horns and you never had to work a day in your short life?”

“Ha fucking ha. That is so far from the truth it almost makes me want to laugh. Also, go fuck yourself sideways with a jagged rock.”

“You’re right. You don’t look fat enough to be a coddled wiggler. Can’t imagine why you’d ever want to leave your hive if that were the case either.”

Just as you are beginning to wonder why you even bothered talking to her, she finally answers your question. “Our buddies down there are digging around the boundaries of the drone nest looking for a room full of eggs and grubs, OBVIOUSLY. If we’re gonna steal the grubs we have to FIND them first. Jaw has the biggest horns. He’ll see it first. He’s probably telling ‘em all where to go, unless Queenie borrowed one of the drones’ teeny brains for a second to get directions. They’ll give us the high sign when they’re ready to break in. Til then all we gotta do is watch out in case the drones figure out what’s going on before they’re ready. It isn’t too hard fighting ‘em one or two at a time in the tunnels where more of them won’t fit next to each other, but once they know you’re there the whole lot will come chargin’ after you and sooner or later they get smart enough to start digging around to surround you. Then before you know it you’ve been pulled into a million pieces. With these jobs you gotta be sneaky, then fast.”

You’re pretty sure Aradia never mentioned stealing and raising drone grubs. You aren’t even sure if you knew drones HAD grubs before. How would you know they wouldn’t turn on you when they grow up? This time you keep your question to yourself.

“Tell you what, kid. I’ll come up with a good name for you. A real one. After I see how well you can put up a fight.”

You like the name you gave yourself _just fine_ already.


	13. Chapter 13

“Oh SHIT, get down, get down!” Wings of Moth hisses. One wrong shift in the wind later, the Scout has snatched you up in her arms, leaped out of the palm tree and deposited you roughly on the ground. Before you can even work up a proper complaint she is already shaking Conodont Fin rudely out of his nap. You can just barely hear her growling into his ear, trying to keep the noise level down. “Wake UP you poetic asshole!”

He looks groggy, but as soon as he catches the urgency in Wings of Moth’s voice he hauls himself up on his feet and tries to shake the fog out of his head. While you look with puzzlement in the direction she was looking before, Wings of Moth snatches both you and Conodont Fin around the waist with each arm and hauls both of you down with stumbling steps into the entrance of the previous day’s temporary hive. She is a lot stronger than her wispy figure would have you guess.

You try to poke your head out of the temporary hive entrance, but Wings of Moth pushes you back down as if she is dunking you underwater. “Shhh!” What the fuck, you haven’t even said anything. Wings of Moth slowly raises her head until just her horns are poking out aboveground. Apparently this is enough for her, because she ducks her head down very quickly, starts pushing both of you down the tunnel, then changes her mind and leaps back out of the tunnel entrance. “Shit! Where’s that boulder? There! Auuugh it’s too heavy. Quick, give me a hand!”

Only after you jump out along with Conodont Fin to help her do you realize the true gravity of the situation. The imperial drones are downwind of you, and they are all swarming in your direction. _Nefur let your purrey smell you until it’s too late!_ Whatever you may think about Wings of Moth’s personality at this point, you realize that at least she is good at her job.

Between the three of you, you clumsily manage to manhandle the boulder back into place over the tunnel entrance with all of you inside just before the drones start clawing at the entrance. All three of you pause for a moment to catch your breath, then you start hurrying down the corridor to catch up with the rest of your group.

“That boulder is only going to hold until they summon the carpenter droids to start digging underneath it,” Wings of Moth huffs.

A very short distance later, you realize your eyes are so useless you couldn’t even see your own hand if you waved it in front of your face. You are now relying completely on the sensory input from your horns. You focus harder on where you are going, trying not to think about the drones that will soon start closing in behind you.

The floor gets more and more uneven as you go on. There are heaps of dirt littered everywhere where Granite Jaw hasn’t had a chance to clear them away yet. It’s a promising sign; you must be catching up. As you approach the digging team up ahead, Wings of Moth fans your mingled alarm pheromones forward with a few deft flicks of her wings, filling your smell vision with faint swirls of red.

“Gentlemen. Wings of Moth.” Granite Jaw intones in greeting, his grave voice deeper than an ocean trench. Your horn sense glints sharply off of his long teeth. “I assume we can shortly expect a few… guests?”

Wings of Moth replies, “The carpenters hadn’t arrived yet when we left. We prolly have ‘bout ten minutes. How close are we to finding some eggs?”

“There is a brooding room one hundred spear lengths straight from where our tunnel turns to the right just ahead. Do not forget that with this development we will need to dig a new exit tunnel. We can use the extra dirt to seal off the way we came and buy us some time.” Granite Jaw has already pushed past you to begin doing so. He tamps down the pile of dirt so thoroughly it may as well be solid brick. You wonder how much good it will do.


	14. Chapter 14

Aradia, Thunder Beak, Granite Jaw and the Queen have done an assload and a half of digging and they still have a lot more to go. You can’t blame either of them for the thin coating of sweat that beads up at their foreheads. When she sees your group all gathered together, Nautilus calls a very brief break for the four of them to have a long swig of water and a few bites of dried meat to keep up their strength. You are keyed up, straining your horn senses for any sign of drones gathering on the opposite side of the dirt wall.

The atmosphere is tense as the digging resumes. Queen Nautilus Curl splits up the group into opposite directions, with her and Aradia scooping their way toward a new exit, Thunder Beak carving a path toward the drone nest, and Granite Jaw compacting all sides of the tunnel to fortify them against attack.

You spare a moment to appreciate how much of a goddamned badass Aradia is, keeping pace with trolls twice her size and still going strong. Her psionics must be at least as powerful as Sollux’s, although most of the time she isn’t nearly as flashy about it. You are starting to feel emotional. It’s going to be hard when she leaves you behind to live out the rest of her future. “I am so fucking proud of you,” you tell her quietly enough that your voice just barely carries over the crackle over her power into her ears. Her brief, brilliant smile fills you with confidence.

Minutes later, Wings of Moth is the first to bear her teeth in a snarl, drawing a wooden spear from her back to wield in both hands. After a few more seconds your horn sense faintly picks up scurrying feet and digging claws on the opposite side of the wall. Waves of deep indigo attack pheromones roll off of Wings of Moth’s frame. Although your signals are not nearly as strong, you feel the same way. You taste a fight brewing so strongly it seems to fill your entire body. Before a conscious thought even crosses your thinkpan you already have a sickle ready in each hand and your feet spread wide and steady on the ground.

Neither end of the tunnel is ready yet when the first carpenter droid bursts through. It’s just your size. You swipe your right sickle in a downward arc and slice its head right off. Wings of Moth nearly spears _your_ head off as she stabs an imperial drone through the thorax, still halfway encased in dirt. You step back to give her space. Not a second later two more carpenter droids have widened their opening on either side. Conodont Fin harpoons through the side of the one on the left while you slice open the one on the right and cut off the knee of the imperial drone just behind it. As it stumbles you slice though its abdomen and block a sharp claw from the next drone behind it.

Your digging team picks up the pace, but so do the droids. The opening in the tunnel keeps expanding. At five droids wide, you are locked in constant battle with two imperial drones at the same time, using the mounting bodies of the slain for cover. At seven droids wide, you catch a rapid fire barrage of harpoons; Conodont Fin’s crossbow is much more useful than you gave it credit for at first glance. Wings of Moth is blocking, jabbing, bashing and stabbing away at three drones, using her long wooden spear as a quarterstaff. At ten droids wide, Granite Jaw stops digging and joins the carnage instead. He doesn’t even bother to draw his weapon at first, crushing two heads together with his bare hands while mauling the abdomen of a third with the claws on his feet. At fourteen droids wide, the floor is slick and muddy with blood and loose body parts. After that, you lose count.

You are being driven farther and farther apart from your fighting companions as the bodies pile up and get in the way. It becomes next to impossible to predict where new drones will burst forth next; they have started digging below you, above you, beside you, and through the heaps of the dead right in front of you.

You are completely surrounded.  
You are in your element.

When the floor gives way beneath you, you balance on the next drone’s face, leap onto the wall, ricochet off and slice downward, cleaving its face in half while blocking a downward swing from a claw with your elbow. Both blades arc from one foe to the next. You use both arms, both legs and all three dimensions. You will **not** let the drones break through to Queen Nautilus Curl and Aradia.

 _Fuck yes._ If you can do this well against the imperial drones, maybe things wouldn’t work out so badly for you in the future after all. You can do this. You are a _god_.

You slip on a severed chunk of drone thorax.

“FUCK!”


	15. Chapter 15

You land awkwardly on your right shoulder in a pit with your legs sprawled over the abdomen of a drone, so freshly dead its legs are still twitching. There is no time to feel disgust at the squelch of bloody flesh under your ass. The jolt squeezes the breath out of your lungs, and in the few panicked seconds it takes to catch your breath, your think pan and your body feel far too slow and difficult to move. With the claws on its foot, the nearest drone scores a hole through your beetle husk armor and a shallow gash through the skin on your abdomen. It dodges a swipe from your left sickle and steps right into the wound with a considerable portion of its weight.

Pain tends to bring out the best in your vocabulary. “DIE, YOU ASSLICKING BULGE PUSTULE! I HOPE YOUR FETID LUKEWARM CORPSE GETS TRAMPLED BY A THOUSAND SWEAT-DRENCHED MUSCLEBEASTS!” You slice through the back of its knee, the weak joint between two chitinous plates of armor.

The drone answers with a piercing shriek as it collapses toward you, arm claws shooting toward your neck. You have very little space to roll out of the way. You parry with your sickles and try to kick it away to no avail. Damn thing must be three times your size and ten times as heavy. You bring down the pommel of your right sickle between its eyes as it lunges into your face, trying to sever your jugular. It stops for a fraction of a second, stunned and blinking, and it gives you just enough time to chop off the head. The drone may be dead, but now you are immobile up to your chest, wedged on top of one dead body in a pit and weighed down under another. You are nearly drowning in drone blood, and it’s enough to interfere with your horn senses. You can just about shield your face and shoulders with your sickles crossed in front of them, but this isn’t going to work for very long.

The next imperial drones rain blows down on your upper body, landing a few grazes despite your best efforts. Fortunately or unfortunately, they soon lose interest, deeming you sufficiently subjuggulated, and start climbing over you to get at Aradia and Nautilus Curl instead. Your legs are gradually falling asleep. Your whole body is going to turn into one giant bruise. The heavy weight on your body is starting to make breathing more difficult.

You are out of ideas, so you beg your new colony mates for mercy. “HELP!” You gasp. “I’M STUCK!” _Don’t leave without me, oh please, oh god, oh fuck._ You honestly couldn’t blame them if they did leave a weak chump like you behind to starve if you don’t suffocate or get seriously ill first. Wouldn’t that be just like the vast majority of your contemporaries? Were they lying about trying not to let their trolls die unnecessarily? What if your death becomes necessary for the others to escape? At least that would make your death heroic. You can die like a god without ever having reached god tier.

It is with those miserable thoughts that you feel yourself being pulled upward from the debris by none other than Queen Nautilus Curl herself, her crackling psionics illuminating the tunnel with dim sparks. The fresh drone corpse slides off you with a heavy thud. As soon as you are somewhat unsteadily back on your feet, more imperial drones flood after you through the opening, but you have already hit the ground running, taking great greedy gulps of air as you catch up with the rest of your colony.

Your digging team must have finished the tunnels in a hurry, because they are already bolting for an exit, surrounded by a floating asteroid belt worth of ill-gotten dodgeball sized spiked eggs. Granite Jaw punches the side of the tunnel behind you so hard it causes a cave in on top of the army of drones in hot pursuit.

Scrambling upward, you break through the underground dirt layer into the main hive caverns above, constructed from mud, sand and hardened droid saliva. Your group does not linger; Thunder Beak has already drilled a hole through the side into the sweet, welcome air of the Alternian night. After so long in complete darkness, the light from both moons is blinding.

She pushes through and flies away, lifting Conodont Fin and a comet’s tail of drone eggs after her with her psionics. Wings of Moth dives out after them, wings gaining lift before her feet even touch the ground. Queen Nautilus Curl passes you off to Aradia, who grabs you by the hand and sweeps both of you up into the air. She, too, is surrounded by drone eggs. A wide grin is plastered across her face and there isn’t a single scratch on her, thank Vast Glubbing fuck. Last out the door is Queen Nautilus Curl, floating the massive bulk of Granite Jaw and only a handful of drone eggs along behind her.

Not a single drone can follow you. “WHAT’S THAT, BILGEGUZZLERS?” You screech back after them, hysterical with adrenaline, “YOU CAN’T FUCKING FLY, CAN YOU? HAHAHAHAHAHA!”


	16. Chapter 16

About ten minutes later, you have calmed down enough to take stock of the situation. Sticky with drone blood mixed with a little of your own, you feel achy and disgusting. You are probably going to have to break the scab off of the gash in your abdomen. It’s so dirty, you really wouldn’t be surprised if it gets infected.

Your beetle husk chain mail already looked ridiculous before, but now it has several scratches and a giant gash in it. “Since I need to do the same for my own clothing anyway, would you like me to repair your armor while I’m at it?” asks Thunder Beak. She appears to be unharmed, but her entire outfit is charred from heavy psionic use. “Isn’t gathering husks such a pain?” Her eyes glint sharply as she catches sight of the thick stripe of dark clotted blood through the hole. “On second thought, would you like me to repair _you_ first?”

Holy fuck, you have been told that is exactly the same expression Kanaya made while you were asleep and she cut off Tavros’s goddamned legs. “Fuck no, if you’re going to be a creep about it!”

Grinning, Thunder Beak backs off. “Don’t you think you should at least get it cleaned?”

“No, I am obviously going to leave this wound crusted in dirt, rocks, drone entrails and small bits of carapace like mortar in a gargantuan fucking stone wall. By which I mean, yes, I’m going to fucking clean it myself.” You have just employed a stellar example of Earth Human Sarcasm. Earth Humans are the most irritating mammals ever to crawl into existence. God, you miss them.

Thunder Beak is still grinning. “Are you always this crabby?”

“Congratulations for just having figured that out. You are the scholar of the century.”

She looks baffled but doesn’t press you any further. It’s better that way.

“You know what? Actually it would help if you have some kind of magic herbs or whatever the fuck to keep this cut from getting infected.”

Wings of Moth flits past you in the air. Now that you can get a close look at her, you can see that her right wing looks a bit ragged around the edges; big wings make for a big target. Thankfully it does not appear to be enough to hinder her flying. Her arms and legs are scuffed up with minor cuts and scratches, but overall she looks like she pulled though okay. “’Ey, I know just what to call you! Your friend is OBVIOUSLY a kick ass Raider, but I’ve got nothin’ good for her just yet. But you! YOU can be Volcano Claw, the way you exploded alla those drones!”

Huh. You think you can live with that name. “You mean you didn’t think I fucked up like a complete chump?”

“If it doesn’t kill you permanently, it’s not a REAL fuck up, right? You’re not a Soldier. Fuck’s sake, you’re not even an ADULT, and you were dicin’ ten of ‘em up into party cubes all at once. Looks like a pretty good first raid to me.”

You and every single one of your companions look absolutely exhausted, but you still have to find a place to settle in and rest for a while. Queen Nautilus Curl had previously been taking up the rear of the flying group but has since migrated into the lead. She appears to be steering her colony toward the mountain range, but the distance is too great to cover in the remainder of tonight. Instead, after flying over a wide river, Queen Nautilus Curl appears to be satisfied that her colony has covered a great enough distance that the drones will be unable to catch up. She begins her descent and the rest of the group follows silently in her wake. You land by the riverbed, and with one final feat of psionics she, Aradia and Thunder Beak carve out another temporary hive, now twice as large as before to accommodate your horde of stolen drone eggs. The very first thing you do is to wash the crust of blood off of your skin and clothing. You feel better already.

Together, the psionics have gathered about thirty eggs. Upon closer inspection, you realize that each of the drone eggs is the same size and shape as a Matriorb, but in different colors. This shouldn’t surprise you as much as it does. You count fifteen grey orbs with red spikes, twelve that are completely red, two that are shiny and black as obsidian, and one actual Matriorb. If you had to hazard a guess, you would say the most numerous eggs had to be the imperial drones and the carpenter droids since you saw so many of them in their hive, but you can’t tell which color is which. The black ones are probably the type of drone that looks like His Honorable Tyranny; you’ve heard rumors about his blood from Terezi. How long will you need to wait for them to hatch?


	17. Chapter 17

It takes three nights of travel to reach the jagged mountain slopes. Queen Nautilus Curl directs the group toward a lake nestled into a valley. She doesn’t need to; the other prehistoric trolls are already racing ahead with their horde of eggs. As you draw closer, you immediately recognize the pitted vertical cliff face on the west side of the valley even though half of it is submerged under deep water.

There just one adult lowblooded troll’s height above the water is the ledge Aradia showed you hundreds of millions of sweeps in the future, complete with freshly painted figures, covered pots of red dye and the soft, delicate antenna of some kind of large moth that appears to have been repurposed as a fine paint brush. “Hey, which one of you painted these?” You are curious.

“Me!” Queen Nautilus Curl pipes up cheerfully. “I did all of these myshellf. Glad you like them, kid.” Was it that obvious? Ghosting past you in midair, she pinches your cheek. The heat rises to your face a little and you grumble half-heartedly in her general direction.

The ledge has been extended outward with a section of sturdy wooded scaffolding, bound together with strong spider silk ropes. It’s wide enough for two trolls (or Granite Jaw by himself) to land at the same time. A rope ladder dangles down from the wooden scaffolding and stops just short of the water’s edge. Underwater, the cliff is encrusted with shellfish and algae. Various transparent, squishy aquatic creatures dart away from your shadows as you hover over the scaffolding and wait for your turn to land.

Farther along the ledge, there is a hole carved into the cliff face, sealed off with a simple wooden door. All of you file inside. Inside the cliff, the rock has been hollowed out into five respiteblocks and a common area, where the eggs have all been carefully deposited in a circle. You definitely don’t remember seeing all of this when Aradia showed you the cliff face before. What happened to this cavern during the intervening sweeps? Did it collapse? Was it destroyed in a vast psionic battle? Was it filled in with lava? Did Granite Jaw hide the entrance with a massive boulder that survived to the present day? You nudge Aradia with your elbow, but with her round-eyed fascination, you doubt that she knows any more about it than you do. Whatever it is, you feel reasonably confident that you can handle it now.

So this is home now, right? You poke around into the nearest room which branches off of the common area. In lieu of a door there is some kind of tapestry hanging like curtain from hooks carved into the top of the doorway. A pattern of a red dragonfly wing is woven into the tapestry from red and white strips of silk cloth. When you push the tapestry aside, you can see that the interior is neatly organized with shelves full of needles, thread, spools of spider silk cloth, pots of dye, and various insect husks and wings that you can only assume are for decoration. There is some kind of primitive spinning tool and some kind of handheld thing that reminds you of a loom, complete with half of a tapestry on it.

The room contains something that almost looks like a proper recuperacoon carved from rock in the far corner, complete with a drain at the bottom which is plugged from the outside by red clay. You can see a trough carved into the floor, where the liquid would flow away from the recuperacoon to an unknown destination outside. The recuperacoon, you are disappointed to note, appears to be filled with plain water.

Thunder Beak pokes you in the ribs. “You wish you had a room as great as mine, don’t you? Would you like me to help carve one for you? Would you like me to make something simple before the carpenter droids hatch and get big enough to take over?”

“Well fuck, you can’t have that much energy left after so much flying around and carrying someone else and a bunch of eggs with you. If another night without sopor was going to kill me it could have fucking hurried up and done it so very long ago.”

She shrugs and grins. Evidently it’s not a big deal.


	18. Chapter 18

“Volcano Claw, my grubbie!” Wings of Moth drapes an arm over your shoulders unexpectedly. She clings when you try to shove her off. “If you want some proper sopor, you and I are gonna have to go hunting for sopor slugs sometime. Just as long as you don’t let ‘em touch you! That shit is strong straight from the source! Maybe we can go tomorrow, yeah?”

You still think Wings of Moth is annoying, but that actually sounds like fun. “Okay, fuck, fine.” It’s going to take a while to get used to answering to that name, but it sure beats being labeled as a mutant.

You spend the waning hours of the night scoping out the other respiteblocks of your new hivemates while Thunder Beak busts open some rock to make room for you and Aradia. Seeing Aradia help her out makes you feel sad; the temporary respiteblock they’re making will only end up as a guest room or accommodations for another troll in the future.

The next room you look into is large but nearly empty, with a tunnel that continues upward and outward and leads to a sort of balcony in the cliff. Wooden spears are piled haphazardly in the corner opposite a large recuperacoon; this room must belong to Wings of Moth. Other than that, there is nothing more than a woven mat of palm leaves covering a large part of the floor. It looks as though she probably hasn’t spent much time here other than for sleeping, preferring to get outside and fly instead. That’s an idea you could get behind, if you could fly.

Pushing aside a curtain decorated with hundreds, if not thousands of tiny seashells just like Queen Nautilus Curl’s clothing, you can see that Queen Nautilus Curl’s respiteblock is decorated with wall paintings. The room is as sparsely furnished as Wings of Moth’s room, containing nothing more than a shelf full of paints, carved directly into the rock. It looks small at first glance. How will she be able to bring herself to knock down the walls to expand the space once she can direct the carpenter droids to dig to her blood pusher’s content? But then you realize that there is a staircase tucked into the corner just to the right of the entrance, where you wouldn’t be able to see it without actually stepping into the room. The staircase spirals downward into a much larger room carved below the water level, beautifully lit up by bioluminescent comb jellies. You are impressed.

Below the water there is an opening leading to the lake outside, closed off from the indoors by a grate carved from thick chitin in the shape of a door. With three entrances to the hive that you have seen already, it looks easy to keep large predators out but very difficult to defend from an attack by another troll colony. You suppose that’s where the drones will come in eventually.

Condont Fin has his own separate hive entrance underwater in his respiteblock as well. In fact, his entire respiteblock is underwater, with only a simple staircase leading down to it from the common area of the hive. It’s hard to see much of anything in there. He chooses to explain it to whether you want to hear about it or not:

“My hive entrance goes deep and dark  
Where daylight barely penetrates  
So I can keep my watch above  
Until such time the sun abates.”

“Yeah thanks, you hipster.”

Conodont Fin bows, wiggling his eyebrows.

Rolling your eyes, you step into Granite Jaw’s hive last of all. It’s just as big as you would expect it to be to accommodate his size, and you expect that it will soon get bigger. His block is full of a wide range of weapons and tools for making them, rather than just what you saw in his hands. Granite Jaw has decided to put a dainty little curtained window into his block, looking directly onto the clutch of drone eggs. He also has a separate, slightly smaller block that appears to be a kitchen. There is a carefully carved stone pot hanging over a fire pit, with a stockpile of wood stacked on the left and a cupboard full of wooden dishes and utensils on the right. A small ventilation shaft leads up through the ceiling to draw away the smoke. The kitchen leads to another room at least as large as the respiteblock and the kitchen combined. There are shelves and shelves of food and ingredients here; it must be the pantry. Another door from the pantry leads right back to the common area.

“I want to be the first one to see when the precious grubs hatch,” Granite Jaw rumbles at you, eyeing the drone eggs with obvious affection. “Ah, but duty so often tears me away.” He trundles off into the kitchen and starts cooking up something that smells delicious. Apparently his talents are wasted on being a mere Soldier. You never would have expected it just by looking at him.

By the time you finish touring around, your bare bones respiteblock is already finished. Thunder Beak and Aradia were kind enough to fill up your recuperacoon with water. It’s cold and hard and it isn’t very soothing, but at least you can sleep in the pleasant weightless feeling of a liquid instead of a pile of leaves.


	19. Chapter 19

Over the next few nights you hardly spend any time in the hive at all. Shortly after dusk, you follow Wings of Moth up a stone staircase out through a back exit that leads up to part of the mountain slope that isn’t nearly as steep. A thick forest blankets the entire slope, obscuring the hive entrance from view. It would be easy to get lost if you didn’t have someone to follow on the way back. Most of the rest of the colony joins you for lack of anything better to do, but Nautilus Curl and Conodont Fin have stayed behind to hang around in the lake instead.

After a whole lot of hunting, fishing, cooking and preserving, you end up with an impressive stockpile of food for trolls and unhatched drones alike, and even (finally!) a supply of acid green sopor slug mucus which, with a liberal amount of stirring, can be diluted into real sopor slime. You are settling into your new accommodations well. You are probably as ready for Aradia to leave as you ever will be, but you selfishly want to keep her with you for at least a little longer.

Aradia pulls you aside. “Karkat.” She asks even though she already knows the answer, “Have you decided whether you are going to stay here?”

“I… yeah.” You make a concerted effort to meet her eyes. Then you screw up your face into your best determined scowl, because fuck everything if you’re going to look any less than sure about this. “I mean, YES. I’m staying here. I think I’m already used to this place. It’s going a lot easier than I thought. Of course some terrible shit is bound to happen to me sooner or later, but at least here it won’t be because of something moronic like a fucking paper cut.”

You take a deep breath, hold it for a second or two, then force a scrap of emotion through your gritted teeth in a very small voice. “I’m going to miss you.” That sounded so pale, or at least cheesy. FUCK. “-And everyone. God damn it. I already miss them.”

Aradia answers with a quick, affectionate hug. “Don’t worry, Karkat! I might be able to arrange a visit every once in a while!”

“Really?” That is honestly the best news you could have asked for.

“Yup! But for now I’m staying here until the drones hatch! I’m dying to see what their little grubs look like.”

****

Every morning before you go to sleep, you eye the eggs with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. Then one night, a crack appears. You know this not from a casual glance, but from Granite Jaw’s gleeful bellow from the common area. When you wander into the room to see what the fuck is going on, you can feel the floor vibrate from the way he dances from one toe to the other like a wiggler with a new toy, clapping his hands in front of him. You would think he looks ridiculous if he wasn’t so glaringly, startlingly _happy_. He seems a bit flustered when he sees you. He takes a moment to compose himself, but even after he stops hopping around a broad grin seems to be permanently plastered to his face. You wonder how long he can smile like that before his face starts to cramp.

“Gather around, gentle trolls,” he motions to you and the other trolls as curiosity drives them all out of the woodwork. “You are about to watch a great spectacle of nature unfold.”

Aradia settles in next to you and gives your hand a gentle, subtle squeeze, then lets go. You try to swallow a lump in your throat.

The cracks in the eggs widen. Horns and spines hammer away at the shell from the inside. Tiny claws poke out at first, then unfold themselves into entire legs. Your new Mother Grub is the first to poke her head out of the Matriorb, a Queen and a leader. At last, she wiggles all the way out and takes a moment to rest, chirping encouragement to her brood mates. She looks almost the same as Kanaya’s lusus, but smaller and thinner, with a larger head and larger eyes compared to the rest of her body. She has stumpy wiggler legs and is missing her adult wings.

All the rest of the drones start to emerge at once in a cacophony of squeaks and crunching shells. Your eyes catch sight of a carpenter droid grub pulling its body free from a bright red egg. When you glance back at the Mother Grub, she is already nibbling away the egg shell and yolk sac that used to house her. A spiky black grub with an elongated head and three pairs of horns erupts energetically from the single black egg. Already following the instinct to guard its Queen at all costs, it wriggles over to the Mother Grub as soon as it can muster the strength to do so, dragging its egg shell with it.

Your blood pusher nearly stops as you spot a tiny grey grub emerging from a grey egg with red spikes. The body shape is slightly off, the claws are all wrong, the color is several shades too dark, but the face, the spiky little _face_ looks exactly like your Crabdad in miniature. You will never look at imperial drones the same way again.

Barely managing to gather up three of them in your arms, you nearly burst into tears when they start to pinch at you. You almost remember to be embarrassed, until you realize that all the others (especially Granite Jaw) are handling the grubs just as freely as you are, picking them up, petting them, or just sitting very close by, letting the new drones imprint themselves on their new troll family. Then you sit down and let them crawl all over you.

By the time you manage to spare an iota of attention toward anything else, you realize that Aradia is long gone. Was that tiny squeeze to your hand her entire goodbye? You feel upset that she never gave you a proper chance to see her off, but it’s probably better this way. Even now it’s going to be a struggle to keep your emotions in check enough to pretend you didn’t know this was going to happen all along. You console yourself by pouring your soul into your newfound calling as a drone grub keeper.

****

Your name is Volcano Claw, and you FUCKING LOVE YOUR JOB, DON’T EVEN ARGUE. Your pastimes include babysitting, hunting with, cleaning up after, strifing with, and bossing around an army of drones of all ages in an ornery yet loving way, sometimes with help from your new hatefriends.

You don’t need to go on raids anymore, because the Mother Grub in your care lays dozens of drone eggs on a daily basis. The next Mother Grub that hatches will be needed to expand the ranks of trolls in your small colony, but you never need to worry about being culled if you are unable to make a contribution.

It is the ninth anniversary of your wriggling day, your first night as an adult troll and an age you are amazed you lived to see. Queen Nautilus Curl holds a celebration commemorating your official initiation into ranks of her colony as an adult. She stands up at the head of the table and grants you the honorary title of Grub Keeper. At the end of the feast in your honor, as the night winds to a close, she paints your likeness next to the others onto the main entrance to the hive, snarling, sickle in both hands and drone grubs at your feet. You hope that seven hundred million sweeps in the future, it will make Aradia smile.


End file.
